In case you haven’t noticed today’s film have gone by the way of today’s video games. More engaging of the brain, 3-D… and to be honest, they’re ugly. I mean, Pixar has kind of destroyed cartoons for me. And the second Nintendo went 3-dimensional I gave up.
But today, in the Orlando Sentinel, there’s a blog about Disney’s return to 2-D. Beginning with “Enchanted,” Disney will expand their 2-D as well as their live-action collection. How very Wizard of Oz of them. But playing before the highly anticipated feature film will be a new “Classic Goofy” short entitled “how to install your own home theatre.” Fabulous (by the way, looking back after actually seeing this film on 11.22, there was no short in front of it…).
But…you ask…didn’t Disney shut down its 2-d animation studios? Why, yes, they did. But NOT the studios in Japan and Australia.
If memory serves, and it probably doesn’t, the latest sequel to Cinderella (which I wanted to rent, but haven’t yet, was animated at Disney’s studios in Japan and its next feature the Frog Princess (a return to 2-D as well) has began animation in the Australia studios (or those 2 are reversed…)
And they’re planning another.
Are they realizing that all of us who grew up on the Little Mermaid and Aladdin think that “3-D animation” is shoddy and lifeless?
I mean, look at what’s happened with the evolution of computers. You’ve got a cool spin on the ball room of Beauty and the Beast. 3 years later in 1994 you have a wilderbeast stampede in a gorge (we all saw the behind the scenes, we all know how it was done) 2 years after that, we’ve got computerized crowds of people screaming in the courtyard of Notre Dame. 10 years after that we got Cars. But Cars and its Pixar brothers and sisters (i.e. Toy Story and Ratatouille) are lacking an inner beauty. Even Atlantis (which, while mostly hand-animated, required a large portion of CGI which is very pretty and the orchestrations are gorgeous, but it just feels cold. We’ve lost something in the translation from hand animation to CGI.
